The present invention relates to annotation techniques, and more particularly to techniques for bookmarking or annotating digital information to facilitate subsequent search and browsing of the information.
Several techniques and systems have been devised to capture digital information. For example, information may be captured during meetings, presentations, classroom lectures, demonstrations, conferences, interviews, legal proceedings, focus group meetings, surveillance activities, and the like. The captured digital information may include time-varying information such as video information and audio information, images, documents, slides, whiteboard information, notes information, and the like. Various information capture devices may be used to capture the information. The captured information is typically stored in a database for subsequent retrieval and use.
A user may want to browse or search the digital information, possibly to find sections of the information of interest to the user. However, due to the different types of information, searching and browsing the information is generally a non-trivial task. Annotations are generally added to digital information to make browsing and searching the information more efficient. For example, certain sections of the captured digital information may be marked as “important” for a meeting, or a user may want to bookmark the digital information where a specific question was asked, etc.
Some applications are available that automatically annotate digital information to facilitate search and browsing activities. However, in practice, it is seen that most of such automatic annotation techniques are erroneous and are not able to take place of human annotation. Further, the annotations are typically added (either manually or by automatic tools) subsequent to the recording session during which the digital information was captured. As a result, the annotations are not immediately available for browsing or searching or performing other operations on the information during the recording session.
In light of the above, improved annotation techniques are desired.